Amanda was born on a farm, by a midwife in rural Vermont and raised in the town of South Strafford in a working-class, bi-racial family. Her father immigrated to the United States from Malaysia and worked as a civil engineer by day while washing dishes at night to support his family. Her mother taught her how to steward the land by raising sheep, tapping maple trees, gardening, mending and fixing things instead of throwing them away.
Growing up, Amanda attended Strafford Town Meeting with her family every year, watching her neighbor’s debate everything from road budgets and school funding to GMO labeling and nuclear power. It was there that she received her first education in both democracy and economics, learning that communities are strongest when the people most affected by decisions have the power to make them.
That lesson shaped her life’s work.
For nearly two decades, Amanda has worked with governments and communities across the United States and around the world to design and implement economic strategies that create good jobs, strengthen local businesses, reduce inequality, and build resilient local economies. Rather than concentrating wealth and power in distant corporations or financial markets, her work has focused on strengthening self-determination by helping communities build prosperity from the bottom up.
She began her career working with the United Nations and international development organizations as an industrial policy and structural transformation specialist, helping governments support local industries, create good jobs, and diversify their economies. Throughout this work, Amanda brought together government agencies, businesses, labor organizations, research institutions, and civil society to identify shared priorities, design coordinated policy strategies, align implementation across institutions, and measure whether those strategies were actually improving people’s lives.
Recognizing that governments often measure success by GDP growth and stock market values while overlooking whether people are actually healthier, more secure, and better off, Amanda now works as the Economics and Policy Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a global network working across more than sixty countries to redesign economic systems around the wellbeing of people and the planet. She has advised governments including Scotland, Wales, Finland, New Zealand, and Canada on how to establish long-term goals, align budgets and fiscal policies with public priorities, and build institutions capable of delivering transformational change.
Amanda’s work has never been limited to policy design. She has spent her career helping make ambitious ideas possible—building coalitions across public agencies, businesses, labor, nonprofits, and local communities so that the people responsible for implementing change help shape it from the very beginning. She believes lasting progress doesn’t come from top-down decision-making. It comes from giving people a real voice in building the future together.
After returning to the United States during the first Trump administration, Amanda turned much of her attention toward strengthening American democracy and rebuilding economic opportunity closer to home. She has helped connect state leaders, researchers, advocates, and community organizations working to advance new economic approaches, participated in national expert working groups exploring how governments can prepare for future economic crises, and contributed to national initiatives focused on developing new public narratives that can break through political polarization and build support for transformational change.
Back in Vermont, Amanda co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance of Vermont to help build a broad coalition for a stronger and more resilient state economy. She has worked alongside organizations across Vermont to advance tax fairness, community wealth building, democratic participation, and long-term economic resilience. She served on the boards of the ACLU of Vermont and Rights & Democracy Vermont and has dedicated herself to helping Vermont become a national model for an economy that works for everyone.
Amanda earned an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she studied under renowned economist Ha-Joon Chang. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for her research with India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of the world’s largest organizations of women workers, and a Family Economic Security Fellowship with New America supporting transformative economic policy in the United States.
Today, Amanda rents an apartment in Burlington because, like so many Vermonters her age, she has been priced out of buying a home in the community where she grew up. She understands the pressures facing working families not only as an economist who has spent her career addressing these challenges, but as a Vermonter living them herself.
Amanda is running for Governor because she loves Vermont and wants to ensure every Vermonter is safe and secure in this moment of compounding economic, political and environmental crisis. Centered in Vermont values, she has spent her career helping communities build economies that are more democratic, more resilient, and more prosperous—and she knows that if we’re willing to be bold and brave, Vermont can once again show the country what is possible.
